Bone Music (14 page)

And maybe she was praying. Santeria ladies like Mama Estrella love Jesus as dearly as anyone does, and more dearly than most people do.

“Mama Estrella. . . ?”

Mama Estrella opened her eyes.

“In the morning,” she said. “Downstairs in the yard — as soon as the sunlight shines directly on her grotto.”

Lisa’s mama nodded. “All right, then. If you think it’ll help.”

Mama Estrella smiled. “It will,” she said.

She left without saying another word.

Lisa didn’t expect to see her again until the morning, but it didn’t work out like that. A couple of hours after dinner, when Lisa and Mama were sitting in the living room watching old movies on TV, there came a knock on the door, and when Lisa’s mama answered it she found Mama Estrella waiting for her.

“You’ll need me here tonight,” Mama Estrella said. “I’ll stay on your couch.”

Lisa’s mama looked a little bit surprised, but she didn’t argue. Lisa wished she had; she didn’t like Mama Estrella very much. She sure didn’t want to spend the night that close to her.

But no one asks little girls about things like company, and Lisa’s mama didn’t, either. So Mama Estrella Perez stayed with them that night, and when Lisa went to bed she had the strangest dream.

She dreamed the Lady took her hand and led her into an endless night-black wilderness. After a long time they came to a bonfire.

On one side of that fire sat Robert Johnson — she knew him from her other dreams, and she recognized him. On the other side there were six old, old men. They were strange and beautiful old men, and even though Lisa didn’t know any of them, she recognized them in her heart, and she loved them.

Of course she knew and loved them! Everyone who has the magic and the music in her heart knows those men when she sees them! They were Kings — old Kings who’d ruled the Mississippi lowlands from New Orleans north to Chicago back before the world broke open. And when they picked at their guitars the sound was beauteous to behold — listen, listen now as Charlie Patton picks his worn guitar, and listen as the strings speak: “Lord have mercy,” the guitar says. “Lord, Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy — pray, brother, pray, save poor me.”

He held the guitar strangely — one hand around its neck, the other all but covering the guitar’s open mouth. It was almost as though he were choking the words out of it, Lisa thought, and then she thought that was such a strange idea.

All of it was strange, everything about that dream. Later Lisa decided that she’d only imagined it.

But it was true, every solitary bit: there in the dream that was stranger than the truth she heard Charlie Patton’s guitar singing, pleading for mercy.

Then Charlie Patton’s guitar went silent, and Lisa realized that the Lady had left her. Robert Johnson stood up on the far side of the fire, and he held out a hand to her.

“Lisa,” he said. “Lisa Henderson.”

It was the first time in all Lisa’s dreams of him that Robert Johnson had addressed her by name.

“I’m afraid,” Lisa said, but that was a lie. Lisa was a brave girl! She was never afraid.

Robert Johnson smiled reassuringly. “No one here will ever hurt you,” he said. “Remember this place and you’ll always have a sanctuary.”

“I will,” Lisa said. But how could she ever remember? The Lady led her here through the darkness, and Lisa didn’t know the way.

“You can always find it in your heart, Lisa, if you know to look for it.”

“I knew that,” she said. Which was another lie, but Robert Johnson knew and didn’t care.

“Come on,” he said. “Take my hand, I’ll show you something.”

Lisa didn’t want to go anywhere. She liked the place with the bonfire, and if she could have stayed there for a lifetime, listening to the music and watching Charlie Patton strangle his guitar, she would have done that.

But she couldn’t, of course. And she knew that if there was a thing Robert Johnson thought she’d need to see, she’d better go with him and see it.

So she took his hand and followed him away from the fire, out into the darkness and forever and on; it felt like they walked halfway cross the country before they were halfway done.

And now there were trees around them in the darkness, and they were climbing a mountain in the hills of Tennessee.

High above them stood three men with guitars.

“Who are they?” Lisa asked.

Robert Johnson hushed her. “These are the Blind Lords of the Piedmont,” he said. “They rule these hills and everything surrounding.”

“Blind? — I don’t understand.”

“Hush.”

She tried to make out the words to their song, and then realized there were no words at all — the blind men were humming to one another as clearly as you or I might speak.

When they were close enough to touch the blind men, Robert Johnson knelt to whisper into Lisa’s ear. “You need to kneel before them,” he whispered, “and ask them for their blessing.”

Lisa thought, I won’t!, but she was wrong. She didn’t mean to be, but that was how it happened — something deep inside her knew a more important truth, and when she stood before the Blind Lords it pushed her to her knees and raised her right hand to them, palm down.

“I live to serve you,” Lisa said, and she never meant to say that, no more than she meant to kneel.

The black Lord smiled; his white companions folded their arms. “We take your service, child,” the black Lord said.

“We take your service, Lisa Henderson,” one of his companions repeated. “Bless you, child. Bless your sojourn, and everything that you endeavor.”

And then the Blind Lords were gone, and Lisa and Robert Johnson stood alone atop the mountain.

“I never heard a white man who knew about real music,” Lisa said, and they both knew she didn’t mean just music, but blues music, real blues like the kind that’s always got some magic in it, even when the least ones play it.

“You never known nobody from the Piedmont, girl,” Robert Johnson said. “Things are different in the mountains.”

“What was the song?” Lisa asked. “I know that song. It’s like Judgment Day, but different.”

Robert Johnson looked surprise that she had recognized it. He nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s called The Eye of the World, and the Blind Lords will sing it loud and true from their mountaintops after the Kings sing Judgment Day.”

Lisa bit her lip. “I knew that,” she said. “How did I know?”

“It’s in the music, Lisa. If you know the music in your heart, you know its deepest secrets.”

Far away in the western distance, Lisa could see the great river, and above the river there was a light. “I’m just a girl,” Lisa said. “I don’t know about things like that.”

Robert Johnson laughed.

“You know all sorts of things, child. They’re written in your heart. All you have to do is admit them and they’re yours.”

Now the light above the river grew larger and larger, till it was four times the circumference of the moon, and Lisa could see it was a great wide eye.

The Eye of the World.

“It’s beautiful,” Lisa said, and it was beautiful, clear and deep and luminescent in a way that made clear everything that shone beneath it.

“Of course it is,” Robert Johnson said. “If the world has a soul,” he said, “you can see it through the Eye.”

And Lisa thought she could see the world’s soul, deep inside that Eye; not directly, but reflected, the way you see the heart of a woman when you look her in the eye.

“Is it true, Robert Johnson? — Is it true what I heard about you and the Eye of the World?”

Robert Johnson went all slack beside her; he made a sound like the breath of a sigh but defeated, the noise you hear when a vacant body lets go a man’s last breath.

“Every word of it is true, Lisa Henderson.”

And Lisa could see it was, because now that she thought to look for them she could see the cracks in the Eye’s lens; and in her dream she imagined those cracks grew wider and wider till finally the Eye of the World fell open like the petals of a desiccated rose.

“Every word of it is true.”

Lisa woke crying quietly in the dark. She didn’t mean to cry. She didn’t want to cry. She hated crying like she did, she really hated it. But it wasn’t like she could stop — she knew that because she tried and it didn’t do a bit of good.

“Tell me about your dream, Lisa,” said a voice in the darkness, and Lisa knew who it was. Of course she did! It was Mama Estrella, poking around in the privatest secretest things that Lisa ever knew.

“I won’t,” Lisa said.

“You need to tell,” said Mama Estrella. “You know you do.”

Lisa said, “You’re wrong,” but she knew the Santeria lady was right. And Mama Estrella did, too; and because she knew she didn’t press. She sat in the darkness at the foot of Lisa’s bed, waiting and listening, for a time that felt like hours but maybe it was only moments.

And after a while Lisa knew that it was right, and she began to tell. She told Mama Estrella everything, there in the darkness. Told her about the dream with Robert Johnson and the Blind Lords of the Piedmont; about the reflecting pool outside the gates of Heaven and Hell; about the night she died, when Our Lady of Sorrows appeared to her in the twilight fading of her hospital room.

Mama Estrella took it all in. After a while Lisa began to suspect she’d known parts of it all along.

“Shungó has expectations for you,” Mama Estrella said, when Lisa had said everything she knew to say.

“I’m just a girl,” Lisa said. “I don’t want any expectations.”

“I know that, Lisa. That’s why I’m trying to help you.”

Lisa knew when she heard the word help that there was terrible trouble caught up around it, but she didn’t say anything. What could she say, after all? Let me alone, Mama Estrella, the Lady knows what’s best for me? Lisa could have said that, maybe, but she was too scared. She loved the Lady and she knew the Lady loved her, but she frightened Lisa all the same, and the dearest part of Lisa’s heart just wanted to go back to being an ordinary little girl in ordinary Harlem with her ordinary mama and her everyday school, and she knew that was impossible so long as she went with the Lady.

So she let Mama Estrella wash her and dress her that morning, and when the sun came up Mama Estrella and Mama and Lisa all went down through Mama Estrella’s store, into the grotto in the back yard.

And Mama Estrella made a candle from three kinds of sacred oil and a water that made the flame sputter pungent smoke, and she made Lisa kneel before the Lady’s statue in the grotto.

And she said a prayer in a language Lisa didn’t know, but three times she recognized the name Shungó, and twice she heard Barbara.

When Mama Estrella finished her prayer, the statue at the center of the grotto began to move. It moved as easily as a Lady made of flesh and blood, but it still looked like stone.

“Santa,” said Mama Estrella. “Santa, we beseech you —”

— as now the statue’s sword caught fire as the Lady raised it high above her head, to strike —

“— beseech you to set our daughter free.”

As the sword swung hard and fast and bright to cut the Santeria lady in two.

They got Mama Estrella to the hospital in time for the doctors to reattach her arm, but only barely. She spent seven hours in surgery, and all that while she was half awake and murmuring, no matter how they drugged her.

She woke the moment they wheeled her into the recovery room, and demanded to speak to Emma Henderson. The nurses tried to reassure her back to sleep, but she refused to let them, and persisted in her demand until they relented.

“You need to find the Seventh King,” Mama Estrella said when they brought Emma to her. She was sickly-looking — sweaty and wide-eyed from the drugs, pale and shriveled from the trauma of her wound. “Take my car. Go to Greenville — Greenville, Mississippi. Take Highway 82 through town. Three miles south of Greenville you’ll see three tall pines that cross themselves. There’s a dirt road between two of those trees. It leads through a pinewoods toward a bluff.

“Follow the road until you know you should stop, and look south — you’ll see a shack. The last of the Seven Kings lives there. Knock on his door and he’ll find you, even if he isn’t there.”

Timeless

There are a thousand stories about John Henry, and a thousand thousand variations on those tales. Some of the stories are literally true; some of them are figuratively true; some of them are wrong. That’s the nature of stories, isn’t it? They show us all the highlights of the world, but they never leave us certain we can trust the things we know. We listen because they delight us, and mind them as much as they illuminate our hearts; but no one with a lick of sense ever trusts a tale he can’t verify himself.

There’s no way at all to be certain where John Henry is concerned. All the tales about him are echoes of one another; and perhaps John Henry himself was only an echo of them all. Who’s to say whether we should believe the stories about his songs, his deeds, his sermons? Even the events recounted in ballad that describes his competition with the engine are uncertain, and those events are so well known most people take them for the gospel truth.

But there is no gospel truth where John Henry is concerned. His birth, his death, his marriage and his sons — all of them are mysteries clouded by a history of uncertain times.

One story says he was born in Africa in the 1830s to a great songster and his beautiful frail wife. His mother died the day she named him (but no story ever tells the name she gave him), and his father died when he was ten. When both his folks were gone his drunkard uncle sold him for a slave.

The slavers took him north and west, smuggling him into Georgia, where they sold him to the cruelest masters they could find. Those masters — avaricious planters — beat the boy, abused him, and battered him to break his spirit. They would have succeeded, too, if they’d never given him the Good Word of the Lord.

The moment that that child heard of God he knew Him and he loved Him, and he took the hymns the planters taught him and twisted them around the music in his heart until he made a song greater than any hymn the planters ever knew.

The planters never heard him sing his song, but they heard it all the same: he made a song that every black man sang to Praise the Lord, and when the white folks heard it they sang too, even if they only kept the music in their hearts.

John Henry’s faith and his song and the nature of his song all grew mighty and most fine, and his faith was a treasure more valuable than gold. It guided him as he learned to sing and work and struggle, and it taught him how work and perseverance make us strong even when they serve our oppressors. When the war killed his masters and the soldiers in blue uniforms wrecked their plantation, John Henry took up arms and fought alongside the best of them.

When the war was over he traveled far and wide, working his way from one end of the country to the other and back again. As he grew old his music grew deep and rich and wise, and in his time he passed away and died.

No one knows exactly where he’s buried, but there are those who will tell you his grave is on the side of a great mountain high above the Mississippi, where the great man looks down upon the river and the land and the nation that he loved. His ghost watches all of us, they say, loving us and guiding us as no other spirit could.